Inside a steel file cabinet at the Fountain Valley Historical Society is a faded black-and-white photograph, dated 1896, of impish children posing for a class photo on the steps of their schoolhouse.

The boys are in overalls, the girls clad in raggedy dresses. Many wear wide-brimmed hats that block the sun from their faces. Few have shoes.

They are clearly the sons and daughters of farmers. That is because the smooth, paved streets of Fountain Valley used to be acres of fertile soil with ripe conditions for growing almost anything: lima beans and strawberries, most notably, but also chili peppers, sugar beets, asparagus and more.

Fountain Valley, the small Orange County bedroom community with a reputation – and a motto – for being a nice place to settle down, is now a pillar of suburbia. Uniform houses: check. Open spaces: check. Golf courses: check. Sam’s Club and Costco: check and check.

The city’s present landscape can, in part, be attributed to its past, to the sons and daughters of farmers. At the center of the city’s planning and development philosophy is its General Plan, adopted in 1962, which, city officials and historians say, showed amazing foresight and led to an ordered urbanization, rather than the chaos that ensues in some communities. But with the city’s General Plan – the first of its kind in Orange County – having just turned 50 years old, those same officials and historians admit that many younger residents do not have even a cursory knowledge of Fountain Valley’s past – a history steeped in agriculture.

“As the older generation goes away, we risk losing the city’s history,” said Barbara Montz, president of the historical society. “Our job has to be to collect and record this information before it’s too late.”

Planning Director Andy Perea agrees, but with a caveat: “The city was a clean slate (in 1962). Before that, there wasn’t much.”

The cabinet at the historical society, though, is a hodgepodge of tattered, and mostly unidentified, photos from the city’s past. Flipping through the pages of the city’s proverbial photo album reveal a history worth exploring.

TRANSFORMING FROM SWAMPS TO FARMS

Like much of the West, the boundaries of cities in the Lower Santa Ana Valley, of which Fountain Valley is a part, were largely an afterthought – a byproduct of rapid incorporation following the World War II population boom.

But the formation of the city can be traced roughly to the 1850s. The city was part of Rancho Las Bolsas, owned by Stearns Rancho Co. The area comprised all of Fountain Valley, as well as parts of what are now Huntington Beach, Westminster and Garden Grove.

Nearly a century before construction of the Prado Dam, seasonal flooding turned the area into a part-time lake.

“It is the brunt of all historical jokes,” said Dann Gibb, author of “A History of Fountain Valley.” “It was swampland. Kids named lakes based on whose property they were on.”

When not submerged, the area was home to nothing but willows and tule pads. The land was largely unusable, Gibb said, except for the shepherds whose sheep grazed there.

In the 1870s, though, a drought gave the valley a reprieve from the floods. What remained was lush soil – and a phenomenon that would define the city for generations and become the basis for the name Fountain Valley: The land had a number of artesian wells that were deep and close to the surface.

“There are stories of farmers hitting these wells with shovels,” Gibb said. “Water would start gushing. Japanese farmers would use reeds to cause the water to spray out over the land like a fountain. Water became our oil.”

The result was a thriving farming community.

The fertile ground lured the farmers and ranchers who would build up the town, beginning with Roch Courreges in 1878. They are families now more known as namesakes for schools and thoroughfares: the Courreges family, the Talberts, the Wardlows, the Gislers and the Bushards.

Twenty years later, the area of what is now Bushard Street and Talbert Avenue became the town’s de facto city center, with a general store, blacksmith shop, church and bar. Bushard remained the city’s main street up until incorporation, but never became a downtown, which allowed development to spread out evenly, Perea said.

“There wasn’t much to preserve,” he said. “We were a scattering of ranches without a downtown.”

For the next several decades, the town, then known as Talbert, was a vibrant farming community.

“The weather was temperate, we had plenty of water, we built channels,” Gibb said. “Fountain Valley has grown almost everything.”

INCORPORATION AND THE MASTER PLAN

Then came World War II.

After the war, Fountain Valley’s population, like the rest of the country’s, boomed. With neighboring cities incorporating and boundaries being drawn, leaders of the farming town realized it too had to become a city.

“It became a land grab,” Gibb said. “The farmers incorporated for self-preservation. They didn’t want to end up in Huntington Beach.”

And so on June 4, 1957, Talbert residents voted to incorporate; Talbert became the city of Fountain Valley. But the City Council, led by Mayor Jim Kanno, decreed that not a single parcel of land could be developed without a master plan.

The plan is simple yet effective: all major streets run north-south and all major avenues run east-west; one area is zoned for commercial or industrial use, another for a business district, and yet another space for residential. The original plan also calls for farmland to be maintained “wherever feasible.”

The result was a discrete city that was easy to navigate and would slowly grow alongside the population.

“For farmers, they did a fantastic job,” City Manager Ray Kromer said. “I can immediately picture any part of the city. Talbert and Bushard: boom, I’m there. Warner (Avenue) and Brookhurst (Street): boom, I’m there. That’s because of the job they did.”

And over the last five decades, the farmers’ vision for the city has come true, with farmland slowly giving way to housing. Today, there are only two major plots of agriculture: the Sakioka Farms property on Talbert Avenue and Euclid Street, next to Costco; and the Miller Family Trust property on Heil Avenue.

Those farming families – many of them entrenched in the city for generations – and their master plan are responsible for, and still the bedrock of, today’s Fountain Valley.

“They knew eventually farmland would go away,” Gibb said. “They knew people would start to sell their land. When I grew up, it was all fields and I watched them go away. The farmers knew what they were doing.”

TIMELINE: A CITY DEVELOPS

1784 — The area that will one day become Fountain Valley is part of the Rancho Las Bolsas Land Grant that a Spanish governor gave to ex-soldier Manuel Nieto.

Chris Haire is a general assignment reporter for the Orange County Register, covering everything from spot news to human-interest features. He also covers the cities of Garden Grove, Westminster and Stanton, and the ethnic enclave of Little Saigon. He has been with the Register since December 2012. He graduated with honors from the Columbia University School of Journalism, with a master's degree. Chris also has a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and would like, one day, to get a doctorate in history. (He's kind of nerdy.) He also loves Russian literature, including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn.

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